Re: My conscript

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Roger Mills wrote:

> H.S.Teoh wrote:
> I'm sure it would be a simple matter to take your carefully drawn symbols
> and enlarge/reduce/whatever them.  I started with handwritten chars from the
> scanner, which required lots of editing, tedious but fun after a while in a
> perverse way.  Your super-, in- and sub-scripts might be a problem, but not
> insurmountable.
One of the things I like my art tablet for.  It's made my computer art
endeavors way easier, since I have no scanner and going to a lab scanner
is a pain!

> Quite by accident, my /tS/ char, assigned to _c_, will also show up with a
> cedilla-- not used in the script, but it looks so good I'm going to figure
> out some use for it!
<G>

> I don't know whether Yoon Ha could create a font for her script; presumably
> the computer can be made to write vertically (under Gates, all things are
> possible....aren't they?)-- but all those left and right additions would
> require a lot of careful tinkering, I think.
I've never seen a vertical font on any computer.  However, it *is*
possible to type Korean, which is arguably more structurally complicated
than Chevraqis (the placement of consonants is fairly fixed).  My Mom
types Korean pretty fast, actually, and for a while we had Korean Win95,
so hey....

> Yoon Ha wrote:
> >> Looks nice.  Only other comment I have is that semi-dyslexic (well, not
> >> "for real," but I might as well be) may confuse letters with their
> >> up-down mirror images.  This is sometimes problematic in Korean as well,
> >> since nearly *all* the vowels are rotations of 90k degrees from one set,
> >> and it can be confusing, especially if you're not awake.>
>
> That's already becoming a problem for me:  /h/ and /f/, and /k/ and /p/, are
> very similar-- and /i/ and /u/, and /e/ and /o/ are mirror images. And
> although "b" and "d" are /mb, nd/, I tend to type in the m and n chars
> too.....Oh well, practice, practice.
I made things rotations rather than mirror images *mostly,* so in the
vowels at least as long as you can remember up vs. down (which is vastly
simpler for me than left vs. right, the latter being a distinction I
regularly screw up) you're okay.  In principle some of the characters do
look similar.

One of the essays in _The Korean Alphabet_ argues that King Sejong tried
to create his own graphemes so they were difficult to confuse yet worked
on consistent principles.  He did a better job than I did, but then, I'm
not a king-linguist-social-reformer!

> I have to confess to being less than a perfectionist..... During the last 10
> years of house-remodeling on the cheap, my guiding principle became, "Hey,
> it's better than it was......"
I'm perfectionist about the things that are most important to me, like
writing...things "just for fun" (like drawing) I'm less worried about.
There are plenty of other people out there to be perfectionist artists
(and I don't consider myself an artist in any real sense of the word).

YHL